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Oracle Team USA has forfeited its overall championships in the two seasons of the America’s Cup World Series, a warm-up series for the America’s Cup, as a result of technical rules violations.

Three Oracle boats, including those skippered by Jimmy Spithill and Russell Coutts, were found to have violated rules regarding boat weights, the team said Thursday in announcing the self-imposed penalties.

Spithill’s boat won regatta titles in the final ACWS event of the 2011-12 season, in Naples, Italy. It won two more in San Francisco in the 2012-season. In the most recent event, it won a match-racing title in Naples, Italy, where Tom Slingsby filled in on the helm for Spithill. As a result of forfeiting the regatta titles, it has to give up both season trophies.

Oracle was discovered to have improperly placed lead weights in the bow struts of all three of its 45-foot catamarans in the ACWS, including one that was loaned to BAR J.P. Morgan and skippered by British Olympic hero Ben Ainslie.

The rules governing placement of weights are meticulous because they can affect boat handling and performance. Oracle officials insisted they had no knowledge of the violations until they were discovered while the boats were being prepared for the Red Bull Youth America’s Cup in September.

Coupled with a spying infraction against Oracle last year, however, the violations are a black eye for the American team owned by Larry Ellison. The disclosures represent still another setback for an America’s Cup that has been dogged by a scarcity of challengers, a wreck that cost the life of a sailor and a dismal competition that so far hasn’t had a single close race.

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Tom FitzGerald is the Stanford sports beat writer for The Chronicle. In more than three decades at The Chronicle, he has covered the 49ers and Raiders and a wide variety of other sports, including auto races. Among the many momentous games he has covered were the 49ers' victory over Dallas in the 1982 NFC Championship Game, which featured "The Catch'' by Dwight Clark, and the U.S. hockey team’s 1980 Olympic upset of the Soviet Union in Lake Placid, N.Y. At the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, he rode the bobsled run with members of the U.S. team for a first-person story. In 2012 he rode on Russell Coutts’ Oracle Team USA catamaran for another first-person story during the America's Cup World Series. In 2014 he rode with IndyCar legend Mario Andretti in a racecar at Sonoma Raceway, hitting speeds of more than 150 mph.
For 15 years he wrote a popular sports humor column called “Top of the Sixth’’ (later named Open Season). He lives in Martinez.